Me and the Moon
by Kitty Kat
Summary: They had become strangers, but she confessed it to him. She didn’t know why, and he certainly didn’t want to hear it. But he understood.
1. Chapter 1

**Me and the Moon**

Summary: They had become strangers, but she confessed it to him. She didn't know why, and he certainly didn't want to hear it. But he understood.

"Why?" he demanded simply as he cursed the luck that brought him into her presence again. He probably loved her; it didn't matter. She was exponentially more fucked up than he was. But that was the thing that kept bringing him back, wasn't it?

"What the hell do you mean 'why'? 'Why' what? Why did I do it? Why am I telling anyone? Why are you the anyone that I'm telling? Clarify for me. Please." She was being more extroverted and demanding than she was comfortable with, so she sat back and sipped on her stale coffee as she waited for his clarification. She only one to treat one person like that ever, and that woman was dead.

"Why… why would you ruin your life like that?"

"She was a monster. You know this better than anyone."

The truth is that she was right; he did know her inherent evil. She tried to seduce him once the summer after graduation, and he wisely avoided the Nash residence ever since then. "I thought you changed. I thought you found religion."

"This wasn't about Jesus, Craig. This was about her." She looked older and dirtier and she knew it. She could barely look at herself because she saw too much of her mother in her appearance. She saw the age lines around her temples and the streaks of gray that she couldn't bring herself to dye. She wouldn't become her mother, not in any sense.

"We haven't even had our ten year reunion, and you have more gray hairs than Caitlin."

"Thanks," she said sarcastically. The last thing she needed to hear after a confession like that, not to mention a night like she had the evening prior, was another insult towards her aging appearance.

"I mean, that's not healthy."

"Don't you think I know that? Why do you think I did it? Why do you think I killed her? She was killing me, and she wouldn't stop. She wouldn't stop until she was dead."

He tried to rationalize the situation, but he hated rationalizing things. They were right or they were wrong. And this was very, very wrong. "You could've left. You could've gone somewhere."

"Where would I go, Craig?" She resisted the urge to punch the table by gripping her sturdy mug and sipping again the scorching liquid. It was like cutting, except sans the social stigma.

"I had an extra bedroom."

"I'm sure your girlfriend would've loved that."

"Leave Ashley out of this."

"Why the hell should I?"

He stared at her until she couldn't look him in the eyes. She hated backing down from an argument, especially with him, but she couldn't win as long as he stared at her. "She didn't do anything wrong, except to not answer a few of your phone calls."

"I needed her, Craig. When she was off at Oxford, when you were off at Julliard, I was here. I was picking up my mother's mess. I was domesticated at age 19, except I had no husband or baby to show for it. All I had was a drunken slob of a mother and burns on my hands and thighs from spilling various boiling food substances."

"I'm sorry you had to go through that, but it's not our fault."

She laughed a little; she had to. Of course Craig was playing the smug yet innocent little bastard. Of course he was. What more could she expect from Ashley's little lap dog? "I made it look like a suicide. It's not that far off. She always talked about offing herself when she was trashed. I could find at least five witnesses who would attest to that."

"I think I should go, Ellie."

She looked up at him and saw the severity written across his face as if a skywriter had done it. It hit her then, moreso than it had all day: Ellie Nash had murdered her mother. And there was nothing to do now but pray.

"_It's a good year for a murder.  
She's praying to Jesus;__  
She's pulling the trigger."_

Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the phone cord wrapped around her wrists as Ellie dropped the bags of groceries on the counter. "A little help please, Mom?" she asked. She still had at least 15 more bags left in the car, and she wanted to put the lasagna in the oven soon or they'd be eating dinner at midnight.

"Eleanor, I am on the phone." She looked at the girl, well- woman, as if she were crazy and continued to schedule lunch with her friend Bette for the next day.

Ellie glanced at her small purse sitting on the table. The revolver was hidden in there, and, even invisible, it comforted her. She walked over to the pantry and removed a pan, making sure to allow it to bang off of other dishes and shelves as she pulled it from the back.

She heard her mother end the phone conversation and stand behind where Ellie had begun the preparation process on the kitchen's beat-up counter. Ellie looked into the window and saw the reflection of her obviously agitated mother. "Are you going to get those bags, mother?"

"I do not quite appreciate this new attitude that you have."

"That's lovely, mom. The bags?"

"Ellie! Quit it! Quit ordering me around! I am your mother, and you will respect me. I am telling you, as long as you live under my roof, you will have a respectable attitude – "

"Do you think I live under your roof voluntarily? Yea, mom, I chose for dad to die and I chose for you to get your stomach pumped like a trashy 15 year old and I chose that the only way to keep you alive was to move back. I loved every minute of that. I loved not moving out and going to college like all of my other friends. You know what I loved the most? I love that I still live here, at age 26, when every other decent human being of my age has the foundations of their life planted. I'm still living with you, I have no post-secondary schooling, and I haven't had a boyfriend since the last time I was in a classroom. How's that for fair, momma?"

"Eleanor, you seem to enjoy blaming me for every little thing about your life that has gone wrong. Sweetie, the truth is you're not attractive to boys. They don't like to date the screwed-up little girls who were gothic in high school and did drugs instead of going to college."

"I never did drugs, mommy. That was you."

"You're a liar. You always were."

Ellie had been inching closer to the kitchen table the entire time her mom was degrading her. By the time her mom called her a liar, the fingers on her right hand were gripped around a chunk of cold metal that Ellie had spent too much money on. "Mother, don't call me a liar. I've worked my ass off to save your life. But I'm not going to work anymore."

Her mother scoffed. "That's a terrible thing to say to the woman who gave birth to you. That's like saying that you wouldn't care whether I lived or died."

"That's not true. I do care whether you live or die." She pulled the pistol out of her handbag. "In fact, I care enough to kill you."

Ellie's hand was steady. She didn't know why. She was about to commit an act so heinous that she couldn't even wrap her mind around it. Shouldn't she be nervous, be shaking? Her finger sat unmoving on the trigger, and the barrel was pointed directly at her mother's chest. After the initial shock of seeing a gun in her daughter's hand wore off, Mrs. Nash smiled sardonically. "Ellie, you think you're scaring me. But I know you. I know you could never do it. It's just not what you do."

The drunken woman didn't have time for her life to flash before her eyes before the bullet lodged itself in her heart.

_"__There's no tears,  
Cause he's not here.  
She washes her hands,  
And she fixes the dinner."_

The prosecuting attorney stepped into the office of his unwanted colleague, Detective John A. Winters. "I never knew a place could actually smell like a hangover until I started coming here," he remarked to the man behind the desk who had already cracked open his flask for the day.

The detective sneered. If his job description didn't mean working with this contemptuous ass everyday, he would've gladly thrown the lawyer out. Instead, he picked a folder up off the mound of papers on his desk and threw it at him. "Something's not right with that suicide a couple days ago."

Nicholas Gessler began to flip through the folder. "What's not right?"

The detective lit up a cigar which made the lawyer take a step back and turn his head away from the smoke. "For starters," he said after the first puff, "it can't be a suicide." The detective paused for another inhalation and to allow the lawyer to find the lab report in the folder. "The way the bullet is lodged, it couldn't have come from point blank range or anywhere near point blank range. The way that puppy's in there, the gun was ten to twelve feet away, at least."

"The gun is registered to the daughter, so that's the logical suspect."

"The only one for right now. I'd like you to get me a warrant."

The lawyer closed the folder and held it firmly between his hands. "You're not giving me a lot to go on, detective."

In the three years Winters had been working with the kid, he hadn't called him anything but "detective" once. Never "Mr. Winters," not "John," not even "Detective Winters." It was always simply "detective." "Shaky alibi, possession of the weapon, an assortment of motives ranging from bathroom time to possible abuse during childhood and the obvious alcoholism, I could go on. Come on, I did my job, now it's time for you to do yours."

Gessler took any chance he could get to make a hurried escape from the smoke-filled office. As he was walking through the tiny doorway, he managed to tell the detective, "If I can get it, I'll send it over in a few hours."

"_But soon they'll be coming to rush her away.  
No one's so sure if her crime had a reason,__  
But reasons like seasons they constantly change. . ."_

She didn't get much sleep that night, but it wasn't like she tried too hard anyway. John A. Winters, the "A" standing for "Asshole", had kept her up until 4 with questioning. He didn't want her to sleep in her own house for the night, but she refused. Her mother had already spent twenty-six miserable years ruining her life; she most certainly was not giving her the benefit of another night. She watched him drive off before it got light again and realized that she hadn't seen the last of him.

She wrapped herself in a blanket and sat in the sturdiest seat they had on the back porch as a faint blue light began to emerge. She wondered why she did it, or, at least, why she did it when she did it, but she didn't come to many definite conclusions. She thought about her temp job, about how her mother, once again, caused her to lose another source of income. She took another sip of the now-lukewarm coffee. It was too late and she was too sleep deprived for thinking. She just wanted some company.

She shuffled back into her house and barely noticed the spot on the kitchen floor where her mom had lain dead for hours and hours as they photographed her and gathered evidence. In just a few hours, she figured as she refilled her coffee mug, they'd be cutting her open for the autopsy. Ellie smiled at the thought, knowing that her mother's dead body would finally feel the unfathomable torture that Ellie herself had felt emotionally for so many years.

She found the number under stacks of old papers in her never-used dining room. It was too early, or too late depending on how you looked at it, to be calling him, but her fingers dialed anyway. It rang a few times, and she grew uncomfortable. What would she do if he didn't answer? Leave a message? What would she say? No, she wouldn't leave a message. Too awkward and too much of a chance of his girlfriend hearing it. No, she absolutely would not - "Hello?" It was him, she noted thankfully, not her and her faux British accent that she miraculously formed after only four years in England.

"Craig? Hi. Come over."

"Huh? Who is this?"

She coiled the phone cord around her wrist and pulled her knees up to her chest at her kitchen table. "Craig. . ." she trailed off because she wasn't sure how, after all this time, she should introduce herself. "It's Ellie."

He squinted at the clock and rolled out of bed, holding up the cordless phone with his shoulder. "Ellie Nash?"

"It's me. Come over. Please. You know I wouldn't ask unless it was important." Her voice grew soft as she realized that it had been years since they'd talked. He seemed unaffected.

He sat on the floor of his bathroom and closed the door. His head throbbed with the beginnings of a hangover. Did he drink last night? He couldn't remember. "Ellie, I can't. I have things."

"Craig, I have no one else. Please? I have coffee."

He regretted the words as soon as they escaped from his mouth. "Fine. I'll be over in twenty minutes."

She opened her front door to her old classmate twenty-six minutes later. He followed her wordlessly into the kitchen where she poured a mug to the brim with the best of the cheap coffee she had in the cupboard. He put in four packs of sugar and it was still bitter. She sat across from him and skipped all the pleasantries that he had been expecting. "I shot my mom last night."

He swallowed the bitter coffee and wished she had put something stronger in it. He knew anything to do with Ellie Nash was a huge, huge mistake. But he never expected it would be that bad.

"_. . .And the seasons of last year like reasons have floated, away,  
Away with this spilled milk,__  
Away with this dirty dishwater,__  
Away. . .__  
Seventeen years, and all that he gave was a daughter."_

She leaned her head against the cold wall and tried to bury herself in the cement. The phone buzzed in her ear but the other end's ringing was slightly louder. She was entirely still. She didn't know how these things worked. If she moved, would some dyke make her into her bitch? It was too scary.

He looked at the caller ID and shook his head. "Prison, El?"

She smiled at the sound of a familiar voice but kept her head buried into the wall so no one else could see. "It's not as bad as you think."

He sighed and hopped up onto the kitchen counter, noticing for the first time that his girlfriend's signature smell had finally left the apartment, four weeks after she did. "What do you need?"

"Bail." He took a sharp breath. "Please, Craig. I know you don't want to, but I don't have anyone else to call."

The million reasons why he should do anything in the world other than posting Ellie Nash's bail ran through his head. It was a slippery slope, she was a slippery slope, and getting involved in any part of her life once was enough for a lifetime. However, it came to mind how many times she was there for him when he needed it and how we swore to never allow people to fall into the kind of madness he had to fight through in high school. He hated her for this. "Alright, I'll be over as soon as I can. Don't let some dyke make you her bitch."

Ellie smiled and even allowed herself a small chuckle despite her surroundings. "I won't. Thank you."

She hung up before he got a chance to respond.

"_It's me and the moon, she says,  
and I got no trouble with that.__  
And I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.__  
It's me and the moon, she says." _

It wasn't as if she said, at any point, "this is where she was standing when I shot her." But he knew. It was obvious. She had taken a rag to the linoleum floor of the kitchen and removed most of the evidence of the crime in that room, but there were still drops of blood soaked into the carpet where the dining room met the living room.

She sat on the floor, oblivious to thoughts of her mother and death, and even though he hated her, he told her the thing that he hadn't even been able to admit to himself for the last month. "I, uh, well, Ashley left me."

She looked sympathetic, but he was probably wrong in thinking that. She probably only pitied him. "I'm sorry. I never-" she stopped herself. "I'm sorry."

He lowered himself to his knees next to her. "I knew, from the first sound of your voice on the phone a few weeks ago, I knew you hadn't changed and that you were going to-"

She stopped listening to him. She hadn't changed? That was a novel concept. She used to stick up to her mom. She used to tell her that if she didn't change, if she didn't stop drinking, that she would leave. And Ellie did leave. She left until it was okay to come home again. She left until she could sleep in her own room without reaching for the blade under her bed. She wasn't the same girl who left. She stayed. She stayed until... until she broke.

She kissed the boy then. She leaned up and kissed him on his still talking mouth because he thought she was the girl whom she hadn't even dreamed of becoming in years. She kissed the boy, and to his own amazement, he kissed her back. He wasn't sure how far she would take the kiss, but she knew. She would take him to the place that she hadn't wanted to go to since she was seventeen and desperately in love with him. She wondered if Ashley had touched him like that or if he had moaned for Ashley in the same way he moaned for her. She wondered if he would cry out that he loved her in a moment of ecstacy.

And all he wondered was if she knew that she was laying in the exact place that her mother had been a few weeks ago. And then he wondered if she cared. And then he didn't think much more about it.

"_And it's over, it just started.  
The blood stained the carpet;__  
Her heart like a crystal.__  
She's lucid and departed.__  
A life left behind she can find in her mind, gone away."_

Ellie knelt in the small booth and allowed the prayers to wash over her. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last confession."

The man smiled softly, although through the barrier, she couldn't see it. "Go on, tell me your sins."

"Father, I have done something terrible."

"Remember that nothing you do is so terrible that God cannot forgive you. He forgives adulterers, prostitutes, and murderers. He forgives all people." He had heard what was going on in the press; he wasn't blind to it. He had been expecting her, and he had devised a speech he would give her when she finally admitted her sin of murder.

"I engaged in pre-marital sex with a boy I'm not even in a committed relationship with. And I don't plan to be, either. I feel awful about it. I never meant to treat my body like that."

The priest was slightly taken aback. He hadn't expected that, no, not from her. Maybe she didn't do what the lawyers were accusing her of. He gave her some non-descript advice about cleansing her body and her soul through prayer and abstinence, and she seemed satisfied.

She left the small confessional booth to pray in the silence and almost overwhelming emptiness of the ornate church. She knelt in a pew at the middle of the church and began to do the first of many rosaries that she received as a penance. She pushed her hair behind her ears and silently recited the lines she had memorized only a few years prior. "Hail Mary, full of grace..."

As she began to say the same prayers over and over again, a tightness formed in her chest and she could feel her lungs getting heavier. She forced out her breaths with a great deal of effort but never stopped praying. Her mind was focused completely on the words, but she was forgetting... she was forgetting that she had to admit her sins to be forgiven, she had to accept the guilt to be free from it. She held on to the back of the pew in front of her before the weight of all her guilt pushed her back into a sitting position. She stayed there for a few minutes, her body not her own in the same way that it wasn't hers when she was with Craig, and she finally felt it. She felt her heart begin to swell as she remembered all the years she had spent with her mother. She remembered, for the first time, her smiles instead of her tears; the laughter instead of the screaming. Tears streamed down her face as she finally came to realize that her actions had consequences. She had done it, and there was no more pride, only guilt.

She was sobbing, the tears falling down her cheeks didn't seem to matter. The priest had come out of the confessional and walked towards her, unsure if she even saw him, unsure if she was even conscious. As he approached her, she stood and walked towards him, as well. She fell castrate onto the ground, and he wondered if she was having a seizure or if he should call an ambulance. She looked up at him and he could see how hard she had been crying. Her cheeks were raw red, and her eyes had more red than white. Her hands were clasped tightly together. She had been praying.

"I did it. Father, I did it. Forgive me. I killed her. I'm sorry. I did it. I'm so, so sorry."

He knew then that what the Lord had promised him on the day of his ordination had been true: the truth, no matter how heinous, always comes to the surface.

_"Away with these nightmares,  
Away with suburbia shakedown,__  
Away. . .  
You marry a role,  
and you give up your soul till you break down."_

He didn't know what to do. Was he supposed to cuddle her? He couldn't even look at her. She was naked and shaking in the spot where her mother had died, and his eyes couldn't seem to focus on any part of her body. "What did we just do?" he managed to ask while still avoiding eye contact.

"Something we've been supposed to do since grade 11." He didn't believe her words. She didn't believe her words.

He let his hand rest on a patch of darkened, dried blood. "Why don't you feel any guilt?"

She looked at him out of the side of her eye. Who the hell was he to tell her about guilt? She was a goddamned Catholic. "I feel enough guilt."

"What? What do you feel guilty about?" He knew he shouldn't press it, especially not after what just happened between them. But he couldn't help it. He just couldn't stop.

She stood up. She couldn't bear to look at him anymore than he could at her. It was mutual dislike, yet they had just performed the purest act of love that two people can. He tried to reach for her hand; he wasn't about to give up on her. Not yet. "I feel guilty about leading you on. I feel guilty because I should've never touched you nor let you touch me. Is that the answer you wanted?" He didn't talk, but he left his hand out for her to grab. She didn't. "Maybe you should leave," she suggested.

He did as she asked.

_"It's me and the moon she says,  
and I've got no trouble with that.__  
I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.__  
I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.__  
I am a butterfly,__  
I am a butterfly,__  
I am a butterfly..."_


	2. Chapter 2

**I thought you, as readers, might be interested in this. I took a lot of the same themes from this fic and tweaked them for a creative writing class I took. The following is the final result. And, as a result, I think I've fully exhausted the girl-kills-mother storyline. Finally.**

Truth, like morality, is a relative affair: there are no facts, only interpretations. There was her truth and his truth and their truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.

But then again, there wasn't.

Her Truth

The intimate sounds of breakfast being prepared gradually pulled her out of sleep. At first, the monotonous hum of her industrial microwave and the irregularity of a wooden spoon beating against the sides of an aluminum mixing bowl permeated her dreams. The noises deepened as did the stifling smell of an overzealous toaster creating a burnt metallic atmosphere. Thirty-nine seconds before her alarm would give way to violent buzzing, the microwave's ding of completion thoroughly awoke Julia Pearson.

She felt immediately uneasy, as if she had woken up with sea sickness while on dry land. The crackle of resistance from the eggs as they were poured into a frying pan landed a blow of sharp recognition: no one had cooked breakfast in her house for five years.

In her subsequent attempts to identify the offender – quickly ruling out her alcoholic mother and dead father – she hesitantly recalled the evenings of the previous month and how she had begun to share her childhood bed with Matty, her ambiguous boyfriend of almost four years. The bed sheets felt worn under her fingers as she slid her hand to the side of the bed he typically occupied and confirmed that the spot had cooled in the hours he had been gone. Her frail fingers clutched the sheets as nausea threatened to overwhelm her. As she rested her head back on the limp pillow, the alarm began to sound.

Now no longer able to hide under the guise of sleep, she reluctantly pulled her body out of bed, wearing only an oversized t-shirt with the printed logo of the prominent college that she nearly attended. Attempting to prolong the inevitable morning discussion, she stole into the bathroom, admitting defeat as she splashed cold water over her reddened face. She ran her chewed finger nails through her unwashed hair, allowing them to wax slick with excess oil, and over the misshaped splotches camouflaging her freckles. A half-drank tumbler of scotch, the final remains of last night's unwarranted binge, was sitting on the edge of the sink, next to their toothbrushes. Shielding her eyes from her reflection, she polished it off in a single swig.

When she entered the kitchen, however, it wasn't her bed partner standing over the sizzling stove. "Mom?"

Her mother spun on her heels, her hand over her heart for affect. "Jesus, Julia, you scared me silly!" she exclaimed with a southern accent as faux as it was novel. She smiled at her daughter, but the girl noticed it was not without malice. "I was just making y'all breakfast. A big 'ole Texas omelet. Matt here was telling me how he'd never had real, down home country cooking."

Julia narrowed her eyes, unsure if she should expose her mother's obviously fraudulent behavior in front of her guest, sitting mere feet away at the kitchen table. He preemptively calmed the room by hurriedly asking her if she wanted anything from the store.

She loosened her gaze on her mother, who had turned back towards the frying pan, and glancing sidelong towards the kitchen table. "I'm sorry, the store?"

He stared up at her, although she didn't meet his gaze. "The grocery store. We're going to get some Texas toast." A barely audible noise of disgust followed from her, so he quickly added, "And orange juice. Breakfast food."

Her mother, raising her voice to be heard over the searing mess in the frying pan, furthered that they were having "french toast and omelets, Shug."

Her voice caught in her throat as she tried to explain that her mother had never even been to Texas, so she shook her head and promptly surrendered the argument. She started towards the table, but he had already begun to unfold his limbs from the folding chair he was in. "Matt," Julia whispered, "you don't have to…"

Looking from mother to daughter, he sighed and pressed his face into the hair above her ear as he whispered, "I can't be the middle of this."

She slumped against a flimsy cabinet while he carefully closed the door behind him. Her mother, unaware, hummed the tune to a twangy country song that hadn't been played on the radio in 15 years. Drawing in as much air as she could, Julia managed to question her mother. "Why did you do that?"

The humming broke off as her mother glanced over her shoulder towards the empty kitchen table. "Now, where did that boy run off to? Don't tell me you ran him out."

"I believe that was you." Her voice was filled not with the resentment of a mistreated child but the quiet discomfort that clung to her every move. "But, the breakfast, Mom," Julia said, her voice cracking once, betraying her wounded state. Her mother lowered herself into the folding chair, ignoring the billowing smoke rising in dark circles. "That was his breakfast. He made that breakfast on each of my birthdays. Even the day he died, it was the last meal he cooked." Julia had wandered to the stove and let her hands slide over the knobs on the stove. She flicked them off one by one as the overwhelming aroma of burnt toast and half-cooked egg filled her nose and mouth.

Her mother let her head drop for a second but recovered abruptly. "Now, Julia, I was just trying to be nice to your guest."

The girl didn't turn around when she heard her mother's patent-leather pumps clacking across the kitchen tile, smiling to herself only that the episode was almost comical. "When the going gets tough, my mom sure does get going," she whispered to the linoleum. She began to scrape the crusted edges of egg and let the runny mess fall into the trash.

It wasn't only on her birthday that her father cooked his signature Texas-style omelets, but even the smaller occasions, the ones her mother would forget about. The day he died, he had cooked it for her graduation. They had eaten it alone, in near silence due to the nausea with which Julia was suffering. Facing an unknown future, Julia was agonizing over a convocation ceremony where she would remain publicly unrecognized and a graduation party where only a handful of people would bother to show up. Her dawn expectations remained unfulfilled.

She met Matt that night, as a friend of a friend, one of a hundred guests drawn by the overemphasized grandeur and the added incentive of free alcohol. Her father waved his hand dismissively when Julia suggested the party was getting too large for their modest tudor. He proudly wrapped an arm tightly around her shoulders and told her that it wasn't because of where she had been that they were celebrating, but it was where she was going. She gave a half-smile, all too aware that most were only celebrating her acquisition of a keg, but kissed her beaming father nonetheless.

Two hundred people filtered through the house, filling red Solo cups and glassware made of plastic. She wasn't sure she knew two hundred people, but there they were in black and white, spooning out extra helpings of potato salad and stepping carefully over her tulips. She stood by her father obediently as middle-aged couples complimented her on her choice of college or remarked how lucky she was that the rain had held off for her "big day." She smiled and bore it all – every last platitude – and her father made mention of his gratitude after each Westchester and Davis ambled away.

Once the potato salad, and crowd, started thinning, he motioned for her to follow him into the house. "I left your gift on the bedside table in my bedroom so you wouldn't inadvertently stumble upon it." She trailed him up the stairs, tracing her finger along a continuous streak of dirt that had been forming on the raised wall for months. She glanced at the back of her father, his broad shoulders bending slightly as his breathing became shallower, harder. Her mother's blossoming alcoholism was doing little to help his failing heart. She thrust out her arm instinctively to catch him when he faltered for a moment at the top of the stairs, but he smiled and shook his head, assuring her that he didn't need her help. "I'm the dad, okay, kid? I take care of you." As if to prove himself, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to the top of the stairs, then led her down the hall.

Indeed, a failing heart does not take well to surprises nor does a husband take well to catching his wife in bed with another man. Father and daughter stood muted by the scene in front of them as wife and mother hastily tried to shield and excuse herself from her explicit misdeed. Once her eyes had focused, Julia recognized the man hurrying back into his all-black ensemble as her childhood priest, the only other man she had ever called "Father." Her shoulders began to buckle as the weight of her father was gradually transferred onto her back. Turning to him, she saw his eyes glaze. "I need to lie down." Pushing off of the door frame, he headed into his daughter's bedroom.

Julia looked back at the half-dressed couple, waiting despite her father's obviously tempestuous state. As her priest walked towards her, she held up her hand and lowered her eyes. "You," she looked between the priest and her mother, "taught me everything I know. I can't, I don't know where to begin to forgive this."

Matt's socked feet were sinking into the plush carpet lining the stairs as he ascended, at first to naively search out the nearest facilities but becoming absorbed in the episode of familial drama that he began to witness even before he finished ascending the stairs.

Julia only wanted to see her father, feel his heart beat even faster than hers yet whisper all of the clichés he could muster. It will all be okay.

Matt bent his neck slightly to catch a priceless glimpse of his priest, standing dumbfounded behind the cracked image of the school nurse adjusting her aged support bra. He turned away, afraid he would soon lose control of his gag reflex.

Julia watched her father disappear into the shadows of the bedroom she had spent seventeen years outgrowing.

Matt saw the girl, one he had only seen in passing before, fly into the open door of another bedroom. The meager light from the hall caught the excess glitter on her dishwater blonde and party dress as if she had dressed not for her graduation but for her First Holy Communion. He followed the sparkles into the bedroom where the girl fell into his arms as if by instinct. Without speaking a word, he knew.

He used his free hand to shade his eyes from the glowing light coming through the window. He shaded his eyes to see the legacy of a man, lying face down on his daughter's pink bedspread.

Six years later, after letting the lukewarm tap water carry the evidence of a crime too heinous to speak of into the bowels of the sink, Matt returned with arms lain with groceries, and she, again, fell into his arms as if by instinct.

This time, though, he had no idea why.

His Truth

"You remember what you called me those first few months?" he asked as she unpacked the stiff brown bags. "Mr. Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Do you remember that?"

She didn't turn around. "Something like that."

"Well, I do. I remember. Mr. Wrong, you know, you don't forget something like that." She began breakfast a new, cracking the dozen eggs against the sides of a chipped mixing bowl. "Mr. W-r-o-n-g, that's me." His hands slid over the linoleum countertop, being halted only by miniscule particles of yesterday's dinner.

"Do you want me to apologize, Matt?" She was valiantly scouring away the remains of her mother's earlier attempts at breakfast.

"Apologize? No, it's fine. It's just something I was thinking about, remembering. Where's your mom?"

Julia just snorted – just like that, like some barnyard animal that doesn't chew its cud. His eyes widened, remembering the noises that escaped her lips the night before and tried to juxtapose them with her snort. His eyes fell to the area of darkness between the floor and the cabinets.

Not wanting to broach the subject again, he tried to recall even the most mundane events from his grocery trip. "There's a bit of a chill today – fall's threatening our perfect summer nights."

She casually lifted one of her shoulders and let it drop. "Fall has a way of doing that." She dropped the utensils in a clamor into the metal bowl and used her hands to choke her now-mousy hair into a mess behind her head. Satisfied, she returned to the dirty dishwater.

"Yea, that it does, I figure." His fingers ran anxiously along the veins in his forearm as he continued to babble. "I saw Father Andrew at the store getting some flowers for his sister. I've been hearing that she's pretty sick."

She ripped the skin off a week-old onion and slammed it against the cracking wooden cutting board. A sharpened knife sliced through it; two halves were thus formed, yet the whole had vanished. The boy slipped his hands over her arms and guided her movements until they became swift, clear. The stench of onion became too powerful for anything – even the basil and thyme – to combat. Her chopping slowed, tentatively, as she focused on producing equal slices. His arms fell back to his sides, and he watched patiently as she wielded the knife like a chisel, carving long J's into the layers.

When the onion had thoroughly dissipated into small slices, she released her grip on the black handle and turned to tease the tuft of his hair that was flirting with the collar of his jacket. She nodded to herself and kept her eyes focused on an unknown point behind his hip. "Fine, then," she said as if it were an admission he had been torturing over for years, "I killed her."

Their Truth

Truth, like morality, is a relative affair: there are no facts, only interpretations. There was her truth and his truth and their truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.

But then again, there wasn't.

Truth couldn't exist in the dead body lying on her living room floor, morality either. Moral implications were better left to her father – not the one who laid dead on her graduation night but her moral father, the father of all morality with the autonomous power of the cross and the collar. That power reverberated through her as she let the body grow cold, trying to articulate a morality that would allow her to kill her mother.

Somehow, in the convoluted disorder of motivations, she had to present one to herself before the anguish would cease.

The sky had darkened to a deep blue before Matt spoke again. He had lost control over his muscles when he saw her hand, wedding ring intact, limply gripping the carpet, the faint metallic odor of her congealed blood hardly detectable over the pungent oils of her foreign perfume. Never taking his gaze off of the body, he crawled into the corner until he was overcome by the fatigue of keeping his eyes open.

When he opened them again, she was resting on her crossed-legs beside him and her palms were flattened against the hardwood. "I was so, so scared," she offered.

"Scared?" He leaned against the antique mahogany dresser to hold himself up.

A brief nod and a bit lip replaced further confession from her.

The silence remained as thick as the restlessness. The air had swelled with blood until breathing was a chore and the October wind sneaking through a cracked window stung their eyes. It danced over their chapped lips and deprived them of moisture with every inhalation. A particularly sharp gust caused Julia to cough against the back of her hand. Accepting her defeat, she relented. "It was a pang, a flash."

Turmoil coursed through his body, but he managed to collect his thoughts in order to reply. "What?"

She answered, "It wasn't accumulating. Just a pang, like hunger, but only, it was to murder. The confusion that has persisted for six years, the muddle of hurt and anger and, yes, fear… The inextricable blend – as unrelenting as it was avoidable – they were all a lost tomorrow. Emotions were consumed in other emotions, as they were always being kneaded into me, becoming an integral part of my existence, becoming more me than anything I could think or do or say. And it all came out in a pang; everything was released in the briefest moment. There was a pinch and then I was, in my hand there was a knife, and it cut into her skin so perfectly. Her skin fell into it, and the knife kneaded it, like the prep work for a beautiful sculpture. The valve was finally released in that moment, but it was too late: her eyes were already drained."

Letting all of the air out of his lungs for the first time since her initial confession, he pulled away and muttered, "Jesus, Jules." A brief lull, but Julia waited, unable to interrupt. "I've brought a knife to a gun fight here. My thoughts cannot possibly hold the loaded implications of your words. Nothing. There is nothing to say or even to think. Nothing."

She interposed that "this never was anything but an exercise in articulation."

He shrugged. "Sure. My articulation is for naught, though. It's more than there's nothing to say and all previous words have been voided. There's nothing to say because there's nothing to know. Knowledge and emotions were so vast, and now…. Void. A felled void. Like a black hole, all of the matter and thoughts and genius I've ever encountered has collided into an extreme nothingness. The elusiveness of clarity is pressing into my skin. I can barely even speak about it."

She crossed her arms over her bare legs so that the metal ring on her right hand began to form a dent in the puffy skin above her kneecap. "You'll have your pang. Well, eventually. Mine took six years."

He glanced over at her then back at her mother's body. "You don't even seem deterred by it. You're speaking of concrete, of reality, of meaning, but there is none."

She interjected, her voice rising above the whisper they have both unwittingly adopted for the past seven hours – "This happened, Matt! This is concrete and it's reality, and…" she trailed off.

"It's truth?" he offered.

Her mouth hung slack, but her wisdom teeth still managed to chew the flesh of her cheek. Her head fell slowly to a bow against her trembling hands. A sharp breath was drawn in and, "Yea. Someone's truth. Her truth."

He looked over at her again, but he didn't look away immediately. "Ours can be different."

Her head, yielding to her intense fatigue, slid onto his lap. "How?" she questioned.

"My pang, J. Confess."

She raised her eyes to meet his then looked at the corpse, the blue veins contrasted against translucent skin, dried blood spotting a line down to her bellybutton. Anticipating the answer to her unvoiced question, her eyes roamed but never left the body. "Alright, I tell him. And then what? Confusion, inanition, an anarchical center of existence?"

"What do you want?" he finally asked.

Another question, another sigh. True, it wasn't doing either of them much good, but she responded obediently, albeit with a single word. "Morality."

"Simple enough, no? Something is wrong, or something is right. You can rationalize any behavior, any action, any whim of any person. Morality, your shiny pinch out of the nonsense of your mind that leaves you unable to deny that there is a right way. Your big fucking sign post, no? Your pang. That's where your morality is."

A scoffing, "you have no idea what my pang is," was her only tired rebuttal. After a long episode of staring at the deceased, Julia shook her head in surrender. "Yea. I'll confess."

And Nothing but the Truth

She had recited the words a hundred times but still nothing. She knew she had to submit herself to judgment, prostrate herself, and she knew there was a form. Everything in its proper place, in life, in death, even in denial.

But as the apologies flung at her from across the threshold and she waited impatiently for her turn to speak, she could only recall the words of a nursery rhyme from her childhood. "Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dee, the fly has married the bumblebee…"

Instead of registering her distracted state, the man in the collar was ceremoniously and repeatedly confronting past travesties. His breathing labored as he sifted through motivation and treason; her mind, all the while, was replacing the needle on the tireless soundtrack. "…They went to the church, and married was she…"

Across the inhibiting partition, he began to cry. She tried to rid herself of the final lyrics so she could focus on the form and structure of her own confession, but the rhyme continued despite her. "…The fly has married the bumblebee!"

Showing little signs of letting up – the crying and the soundtrack – Julia relented. "Father, please stop. Nothing is coming out of this. Your motivations, they aren't unusual. They aren't new. Lust and danger have enticed man since the beginning."

"What I did was wrong." He said it without hesitating, calm authority punctuating each word. "And I am truly sorry for hurting you and your family. Nothing can erase the pain I caused, and I don't expect it to. I just want you to know that I am aware of the wrongness of my actions."

She gripped the armrests on the heavy mahogany chair and leaned closer to the partition, closer to the priest. "But how do you know it's wrong? How are you so certain?" His body deflated with his lungs in a theatrical sigh. "The thing," she continued, "I liked best about you was that you chose reality over tradition. You never called me 'child' or gave me prayer penances or anything like that. And that's how I learned to buck structure, and that's why my thoughts never focus. But even when I wasn't focusing, I was checking myself against a code of morality, always. It wasn't always structured properly, and I didn't always do what I knew was right, but I had it. And now I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life alone in a jail cell, and I want to know why. I want to know why I stopped checking myself and maybe how to get back to that place where I know, with complete certainty, what I should do."

She paused to take a breath, so he used it to his advantage and cut her off. "I've known you since you were born. I baptized you. You were the third babe I ever baptized, in fact. Julia May Pearson, I'll never forget how loud you screamed when I poured the water over your head." The girl's audible fidgeting caught him off guard. "Am I boring you?"

A yawn escaped her, and she chuckled nervously in a vain attempt to cover it up. "No. Well, alright, yes, but I don't know. Facts – cold and hard and factual as they are – have no place in the hectic swarm of thoughts. Essentially, the only thing that has any merit is pure, and facts aren't pure, by definition. They're riddled with interpretations and accounts and articulations. We might be way past foregone conclusions, but purity exists only when articulation does not." She slumped in her chair, defeated by her own articulations and accounts; their existence alone marking her unwarranted mediation.

"Then why did you come to talk to me? By your very definitions, if I had something to teach you or show you about structuring your morality, it would not be through words. How would I do it? How do I begin to rebuild that structure?"

"It would be through a pang," she answered.

He gently pulled his sleeve free from the metal hinge it had gotten caught on. "A what now?" he asked distractedly.

"The pangs – like a moment of clear direction in the jumble of motivation that's coursing through me all the time. Not an epiphany, really, something more driven. It's doing something before you can even think to do it. It's completely primal – it's pure human interaction, unchanged and undeterred by human thought."

"And these pangs, you follow them? You commit what they demand of you?"

Her eyes, dulled by the darkness trapping her in the confessional, startling rose to the ceiling as realization panged her. "Yes," she choked out. Her desire for human contact overwhelmed her, but she was blocked from touching even the hand of the priest because of the unvented divider between them. She blindly felt for the curtain leading back to the sanctuary and bounded towards the pews. He was strong for his age and managed to catch her a beat after she had left the confessional. She dug her fists into his chest, slowly losing control of her movements until he lowered her into one of the back pews.

They passed the next few minutes in near silence, only interrupted by the dry sobbing of the girl folding into herself in the hard wood. "It's always been there," she eventually managed. "It's been there in another structure, but I've been ignoring it."

He knew her fate all too well, so he allowed her to mourn in silence. Sobs hiccupped through her body. "It's enough just to know…" She began to explain but trailed off. It was enough now just to know. It was enough to let the guilt wash over her, course through her, become her in a way she had never known. She left the enlightenment unvoiced, but she admitted to herself that what she did was unequivocally wrong.

But, then again, it wasn't.


End file.
